(v. i.) Originally, a double song; a melody or counterpoint sung above the plain song of the tenor; a variation of an air; a variation by ornament of the main subject or plain song.
(v. i.) The upper voice in part music.
(v. i.) The canto, cantus, or soprano voice; the treble.
(v. i.) A discourse formed on its theme, like variations on a musical air; a comment or comments.
(v. i.) To sing a variation or accomplishment.
(v. i.) To comment freely; to discourse with fullness and particularity; to discourse at large.
Example Sentences:
(1) Tony Blair added his characteristic descant, adding " We have imbibed deeply of the Olympic spirit … in throwing timidity to the winds we have rediscovered a spirit that is our own ".
(2) In a group of cases in which the symptoms had lasted a few months only a displacement towards high frequencies ("descant" displacement) was revealed.
(3) Hyperbolic”, sings George, while his friend David does descant, and the massed bands of Fleet Street march into battle.
(4) Yet Ukip – from the very beginning – played a racist descant on top of this tune of justifiable grievances.
(5) And yet there's a descant in Perth to the major-key optimism that has marked every SNP conference in the last few years.
(6) It will certainly bring the contest to succeed Mr Cameron closer – that is the loud descant to everything that is happening among the Tories at Westminster at the moment, as Mr Johnson’s antics demonstrate.
(7) Vocal chords will be lubricated with mulled wine and those attempting the dog-whistle Ding Dong descant would do well to consult the pub’s superior malt whisky collection in advance.
(8) Unnoticed by anyone, he maintains a gloomy descant ("A dollar is still a lot of money"; "I've suffered from depression all my life"; "I am dubious") to their falsely cheerful exchanges.
(9) That's why the opening of the Hockney show has been taking place to a not particularly subtle descant of propaganda and provocation from the great man himself.
(10) Indeed, Rona Fairhead, the current chair and once a favoured contributor to George Osborne’s Treasury deliberations, seems as miffed as anyone, while Sir Christopher Bland and Sir Michael Lyons sing transparency’s descant at the back of the chorus.
Melody
Definition:
(n.) A sweet or agreeable succession of sounds.
(n.) A rhythmical succession of single tones, ranging for the most part within a given key, and so related together as to form a musical whole, having the unity of what is technically called a musical thought, at once pleasing to the ear and characteristic in expression.
(n.) The air or tune of a musical piece.
Example Sentences:
(1) Moments later, Strauss introduces the bold human character with an energetic, upwards melody which he titles "the climb" in the score.
(2) There’s an interesting thing with music like this, how the beat falls with the melody; they often say music is mathematical in construction and this is a very good example.
(3) A psychophysical scaling procedure confirmed that the constraints generated tone sequences bearing degrees of perceptual similarity to "real" melodies.
(4) A model of how people use this information to infer the metre of unaccompanied melodies is described here.
(5) Young children also are sensitive to melodic contour over transformations that preserve it (Study 5), yet they distinguish spontaneously between melodies with the same contour and different intervals (Study 4).
(6) We also know little about the relative aptitude for different musical components, especially melody and harmony.
(7) He presented a right-ear extinction in dichotic tasks, as well as difficulties in understanding and repeating verbal material and impaired identification of melodies.
(8) But the album for which she is being rightly acclaimed, 50 Words for Snow, as well as cleverly weaving together some hauntingly beautiful melodies with a characteristically surrealist narrative, also perpetuates a widely held myth about the semantic capaciousness of the Inuit language.
(9) The fact that "different" responses were both faster than "same" ones and quicker than melody offset indicates the use of a self-terminating search process.
(10) Particular tones were shifted in sequence such that a melody was heard which was undetectable by either ear alone.
(11) Children 4 to 6 years of age were exposed to repetitions of a six-tone melody, then tested for their detection of transformations that either preserved or changed the contour of the standard melody.
(12) The key distance effect reported in the literature did not occur in the tasks of this investigation (Studies 1 and 3), and it may be apparent only for melodies shorter or more impoverished than those used here.
(13) All subjects had high DAF indices on the complex melody, middle on the medium and low on the simple.
(14) Other melody variables are either fixed, randomized, or controlled.
(15) Another one is Melodies From Mars, which I redid about three years ago.
(16) Melody processing in unilaterally brain-damaged patients was investigated by manipulating the availability of contour and metre for discrimination in melodies varying, respectively, on the pitch dimension and the temporal dimension.
(17) In the first experiment, two opposite hypotheses were tested: The slow shifts might express subjects' acquaintance with the melodies or, on the contrary, the effort invested to identify them.
(18) Melodic themes of target melodies were defined by correlating contour-related pitch accents with temporal accents (accent coupling) during an initial familiarization phase.
(19) The present findings indicate that interpretation of a melody depends, in large part, on the characteristics of the "tonal" rules.
(20) In Experiment 1, all to-be-recognized melodies occurred both in an original rhythm, which preserved accent coupling, and in a new rhythm, which did not.